Posts in Category: pc hardware

Haswell’s launch is a little disappointing, even though it does bring a small improvement to performance. When it comes to CPUs, we are a greedy lot, but Intel made us that way. When Intel launched Nehalem (the first gen i7), the performance improvement over its predecessor was roughly 20%-30%.

This was repeated with Sandy Bridge (second gen), which brought an improvement of roughly 25%. Ivy Bridge (third gen) did not maintain the pace, offering only a small ~5% improvement, but we forgave that, since it was just a die-shrink. Haswell was supposed to bring back the excellent OC-ability of SB, and also bring excellent improvements to performance as well as power consumption.

Haswell is Intel’s latest CPU offering, based on the same 22nm process as Ivy Bridge, but with an improved architecture for better performance. It is supposed to be ready in just a couple of months, and rumour has it that it is already shipping to OEMs.

It is real! When it was first revealed, it was quickly dismissed as a rumour, but Google proved us wrong. The Chrome Pixel is a laptop that runs Chrome OS, a glorified browser. While previous Chromebooks have been low-to-modest quality $200-$300 machines, the Pixel distinguishes itself as a very high-end affair, with a best-in-class screen.

Often, people wonder if buying whatever it is that they want is a good idea now, or if there is something new just around the corner. Our philosophy is to buy whatever is good now, and not wait. The only exception is if there is a confirmed product with a confirmed release date and a confirmed price that is better than current options and fits your budget and needs… with so many constraints, that rarely happens.

i7-3770K vs i7-3820

The 7970 is bigger than the 7870, and it is better. 8GB of RAM is bigger than 1GB, and it is better. Naturally, one would expect the i7-3820 to perform better than the i7-3770K, since it is also has a bigger number. Let us take a closer look.